A candidate’s positions on relevant issues is one of the most important sources of information for a voter when making decisions about whom to support in a race. That makes your campaign’s Issues page a cornerstone of the website and a significant source of online traffic.
Rather than simply checking the box with a basic Issues page, savvy campaigns will think strategically about the value they can generate – and capture – with their issue and policy content. Here are some steps to building a thoughtful Issues page that informs voters and drives results for your campaign.
Write for SEO
More than any other pages on your site the Issues pages should be optimized for search engines like Google. That means paying attention to things like keywords, page titles, and headings.
The objective is for when a voter searches for “John Doe Taxes,” they quickly find the page on your website. Use a search engine optimization (SEO) tool like Yoast to adjust the technical aspects of ranking on Search. It will also suggest improvements for the actual text of the page to better optimize for Search.
Create A Separate Page For Each Topic
In order to fully capitalize on opportunities for Search ranking, each topic should be on its own distinct page. There’s tremendous value to having the Issue appear as the page title, the URL, and throughout the body. An Issues page with all of your topics will hamper SEO efforts.
It’s also a resource for campaign staff, volunteers, and supporters to quickly link to a candidate’s policy positions in email or social media to fight disinformation or answer questions.
Name Issues Pages What Voters Would Call Them
In order to help voters find the information quickly, name your pages what a voter would expect them to be called. If a voter is interested in learning about your candidate’s position on abortion, use that as the page’s name instead of “Values.”
You can even have the same content hosted under multiple different pages, for example “Abortion” and “Pro-Life” to optimize for different search queries. Another example would be “Second Amendment Rights” and “Gun Control” – the message will be the same, but having customized page titles and URLs will help voters find the information with Google.
For your website navigation, however, just link to one version of the page.
Record Video Issues For YouTube
Another quick way to capture more Search traffic and help voters find info is to record simple video versions of the issues pages with the candidate talking about the policies they support. Don’t worry so much about production value, the key is having content to get on YouTube, which is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine in the world.
Posting the video to the campaign’s YouTube channel and diligently filling out the title, description, and other info will also boost your text-based Issues page as well.
Building out an intentional Issues page for your campaign that is informative and user-friendly takes more time and work at the beginning, but it’s a long-term investment that will pay dividends the closer you get to Election Day.
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